


O Du Mein Holder Abendstern

by speakmefair



Series: Esperance [1]
Category: Richard II - Shakespeare
Genre: Boats and Ships, Drowning, I Liked Him, It Still Happened, Multi, Not A Fix-It, Rain, Slash, pre WWI
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-22 02:10:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6066691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No-one can save Richard from himself.</p><p>And he who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	O Du Mein Holder Abendstern

_He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it._

**

_All wish to possess knowledge, but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price._

Richard doesn't mind lessons. He knows that his are different to the ones everyone else his age gets, that he has to be ahead of them just in terms of simple knowledge, that he must understand more than them, that he must adapt everything he learns into the endless instruction, the patient tutelage that is supposed to ready him for who and what he is going to be –

 _who I am,_ a little voice always whispers to that, defying his attempts at diligence, _who I **am**_ –

but sometimes he wishes he could be at school, that he could get bored, not work, not care, not cause concern and long hushed conversations if he just once lets his attention drift.

He wishes, he wishes, and he looks out of the window and longs to see muddy playing fields instead of beautiful, sweeping gardens. 

He wants to be allowed to _share_.

Sir Simon, though, wants him to master Greek. And if he can't really share, then at least he can make the one person who seems to care how he feels about things happy in his duties.

Richard wonders if that is what being King means, deep down under all the formalities and ceremony and dutiful attention to the care of his country.

He wonders if it means that the only way he will ever be able to share _anything_ , now, is to make someone else happy with themselves.

For a moment, Greek seems like the loneliest thing in the universe, and he feels unbearably small, as though all the future has come to weigh him down at once.

He wants to go back to reading the book of Byron's poems that he took from his mother's bookshelves. He wants to be outside. He wants to be doing anything, _anything_ that doesn't somehow encapsulate all he's ever going to be allowed.

Instead, he turns back to Hesiod, and works on making his thoughts elegant.

 _If I can't have freedom,_ he thinks, _I'll have as much beauty as I can hold._

He writes.

'Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things.'

He writes, and is careful not to let any ink blot the paper or stain his fingers, and Sir Simon smiles, and Richard wonders when (if, maybe, perhaps, one day, when) the time will ever come that he will know, when _he_ wills, that he can say things that are true.

**

"Is it different?" Henry asks after the endless coronation –

(he is always asking, whatever he does he is asking, even when he doesn't know that the question is there, he is asking. He has been asking ever since Richard can remember, a silent query, persistent need for knowledge –

_Is it –_

_Are you –_

_Am **I**_ – )

and Richard can only ever answer in the same way.

"Not really," he says. The crown was too heavy for him, and his skin is hot to the touch over his temples, across his forehead. He thinks it is probably red, or an unfortunately flattering bright pink. He supposes that is different, even if not in the way Henry means, because it's certainly different to four hours ago, when he was hot and uncomfortable and looked (he thinks) like an idiot, but nothing actually _hurt_.

 _Yes,_ he thinks. _Yes, no, one day, perhaps. Not really. Yes._

He has been King for a long time, really, months and weeks and days and hours and minutes all ticked away by clocks and calendars. The words and the oil and the crown haven't changed a thing.

"It's who I am," he says, and Henry nods, frowning, filing it away as though this, too, is something new.

It shouldn't be. Richard is King, and Henry is his friend, and his subject, and has promised him loyalty. It's always been like this, it was always going to be like this, it's what is and will be and has been –

It shouldn't be new.

It isn't new.

But it suddenly _matters_ , and isn't that the same as new, isn't it, isn't it?

"I don't want it to be different," he says suddenly, more words, quick and heartfelt, a sudden little spurt of feeling that comes from a pain that's nothing like the way his head throbs, nothing like the pulled-tight-feeling skin across his brow, and somehow it's all connected to the way things had ached and grown and were somehow _too much_ , all tangled up in hearing it made real for the first time –

 _Long live the King!_ \--

"I don't want it to be different," he repeats, and Henry nods, solemn and frowning.

"Then it won't be."

It's their own private oath. Richard believes in it more than anything else that's been said all day.

He smiles, and Henry smiles back, small and contained and quiet.

"God save the King," he says with that little twist of unexpected charm and dryness that makes Richard love him. _You are going to be amazing,_ he thinks, startled by his own understanding. _You're going to be amazing and I'm going to get to see it, and this is – if it's new, then that's going to be good. I think this is going to be something shared. I think one day I'll tell you more true things, and you'll look just like this, and it'll be all right. I think Hesiod got it right, and I was wrong._

He doesn't say any of that, though. He doesn't let any of the joy and relief show through (too soon, he tells himself, too soon, wait for the _one day_ , wait like Hesiod said, wait until you know.)

Instead, he picks up a cushion and throws it at Henry's face, just to see him blink and flail and look off-balance as he wonders whether he's allowed to throw it back or not. 

Richard laughs, and Henry, holding the cushion uncertainly, scowls at him, before joining in, unwilling and unable to resist.

"Oh, shut up," he says at last, and there's affection enough in his voice for Richard to stop himself from responding that he hasn't _said_ anything.

Besides, he knows what Henry means, just as he always has, just as he always will.

It's going to be all right. He has said something true, and his world has held fast.

He wills it to continue doing so.

**

He meets Robert, and the world turns more than once in a day, disorientating and too fast, a revolution of sense and senses – and sets itself right after that, sets and settles, his knowledge of himself a fixed point that he is helpless to overcome and does not want to.

Poetry, at last, means something, mornings have reason, his heart has been given a purpose.

He does not realise how this seems to the outside world.

He does not think of how what to him seems as inevitable and right as sunrise will seem to those who still think they must rule for him.

Unused to sharing truth with anyone but Henry, he confides in no-one; unused to burgeoning disaster, he sees too late how in his desire to keep something for himself, he has been holding the seeds of calamity in his palm all the while.

He meets Robert in secret, and never thinks that this is what he is doing; only knows that to keep this new certainty safe, it must be kept apart from all others.

They meet in the gardens that he once longed to transform into a school's playing fields, and now would have no other way. They meet in snatched times, hours transmuting to minutes and days all at once, time endless and too short.

He never questions whether Robert has the right to be there, never wonders why Robert is happy to be a concealed joy, never lets himself think about why there are shadows in Robert's eyes when the evening sky is clear and unclouded.

He only knows that he is happy.

He assumes, foolishly, that no-one will want to question this.

**

_It is sad that Nature will play such tricks on us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, striking us to the heart._

In retrospect, Richard sometimes thinks, he should have known how wrong things were going to end up getting the first time they fought about Robert.

It is perhaps the stupidest fight they ever have, it is certainly the first real fight they ever have, and it ends up with both of them discovering things about their tempers that should possibly have waited for at least another five years.

Of course, if they had waited another five years, it would have been a completely different fight, and there would have been a great deal more damage done.

As it is, one thick lip and one black eye apiece are put down to youth, and no-one asks (though perhaps they should have) where or why or how this came about.

"I trusted you!" he shouts at Henry, who is red-faced and equally angry and not backing down _at all_ , and hasn't he got any idea of what he's done, doesn't he know that Robert being sent away is the worst thing that could possibly have happened? "I told you because I trusted you!"

"They thought you were mad!" Henry shouts back, and his fists are clenched, hard and white-knuckled, at his sides; his chest is heaving as though he's run for miles, not shouted out one nonsensical sentence. "They thought you'd invented him, thought you were making it up, Richard, they –"

" _Your Majesty_ –" Richard cuts across him, driven beyond all shouting into something that feels a lot like being frozen from the heart outwards, radiating something he has never felt before and yet knows is fear.

Not fear of what could happen, not fear of what has happened, but fear of what is, a terrible, all-encompassing, appalled fear of _now_.

He'd trusted Henry. He'd _trusted_ him with knowing the truth of who he was meeting in the gardens, of where he'd come to learn about Rilke and Whitman and not being _lonely_ , and how he wasn't inventing how he felt and other people had put words to it, and _God_ , that's all gone, they probably won't even let him _write_ to Robert, they won't –

Henry is very, very white.

"What?" he says, in a stunned, cold little voice that belies all his fumbling for words that follow. "You want – you want me – you think I should – I – that I should call you _what_ , you think you've earned that from me, that _now_ you get to play King when –"

Richard hits him.

And this time, Henry hits back. Because it's not a cushion, it's a fist; and it's not a new-made, oddly honest and most unspoken vow, it's a straight-out broken promise; and there are seven years of doing things differently and being made into who they have to be lying between them; and it's half a lifetime and all of being forsworn, and Richard wonders if Henry feels that cold fear of _now_ too, and thinks, somewhere distantly inside him, that he must.

Even while they're very unscientifically driving fists and feet and knees at each other, he can't stop the feeling that something inside him is shattering and trembling apart, crystal on a paving stone, utterly irreparable. And God, God, he is so very afraid, for no reason at all and certainly not because getting punched in the face hurts, he is afraid.

**

_It isn't about what someone deserves. It's about what's right._

Henry knows this is true, he _knows_ it, knows his father would never have bothered to tell him as straightforwardly as he did if it weren't true, and yet –

And yet.

The look in Richard's eyes, that look which is as terrifying in its shaken, fearful anger as a basilisk's stare must be, as though all that is good and true and honest in his world has been torn away, as though _Henry_ has torn it away –

Oh Christ, oh God.

What has he done?

_I, Henry, do sincerely promise and swear, that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Richard the Second, and will defend him to the utmost of my power against all conspiracies and attempts whatever, which shall be made against his Person, Crown or Dignity..._

How can that fit with what he knows to be true, with what he had to do, what he had to say, admit, confess, how can that fit with what he now knows he has done to _Richard_ –

The words are spilling from him without his volition, meant to wound, to sever, to annihilate.

"You think you've earned that from me, that _now_ you get to play King when –"

Richard's blow hurts less than his own speech, and is, he thinks, a pain that is still infinitely more deserved. And his father's voice echoes in his head, throbbing with the pulse in his split lip, the words dropping heavily in his mind with the same unstoppable slow beat of the blood that hits the Persian carpet in wide, surprising circles and soaks through to the stone floor beneath.

_It's about what's right...._

It is a relief to hit back. That, at least, is utterly uncomplicated.

**

They don't talk about it again. Not when Robert comes back, not when Henry marries, not when _Richard_ marries, even though that should be the time, that moment when self-examination matters and Henry (as he always is) is there to see it in Richard's eyes, the knowledge that somewhere in all this lies not love but disaster. Not even then.

They don't try to mend the fragments, either; nor try to create something new, build from a new beginning. They do not give their effort to what could be (what should have been, what might have been, what should _be_ ) ever again.

The time for telling true things, the time that Richard had once thought would last forever, seems to have gone. Even when he is honest, now, even while he learns how to share his soul and his heart with Anne, even when he tells himself that his relations with Robert do no-one any harm and can only be good because they are real and true and strong, (and he doesn't think he is lying, doesn't let himself contemplate the risk of it, the danger of it, the outright chance of it all, doesn't ever let himself dwell on the burning hellfire fact that of all men, he is the least able to conceal anything and has the least right to try) it is never the same.

 _Time's past_ , said the stone head, and like that marble negation of what was possible, Richard knows that it has passed and is past for him, as well.

He is a loving husband and a faithful lover, he is all he promised himself he would be as King, he is the head of his church and of state, he balances government with rule as Sir Simon always hoped to teach him, and he lives the life that was always meant to be his without ever once recalling what he almost had.

He never thinks of what promises should mean, of what a truly broken vow feels like. He never meets Henry's eyes when they are both in the House of Lords, any more than he does at a state occasion or a supposedly informal dinner or a chance meeting at some damnable public occasion that Robert cannot ever attend.

He tells himself that he holds no bitterness within himself, that he felt that fear once and once only and never since.

He tells himself that Henry, with his increasing family, with all the things he has been given by God for some unfathomable reason, has no time to feel it either.

He sometimes believes it to be true.

_Time's past. The time has passed. It is in the past._

He refuses to allow himself regret.

He does not open Hesiod again until death has set his world into a coalesced blackness from which he feels he will never escape, not until Robert has gone to exile and death and the God he claimed not to believe in; not until Anne, the star of his heart's wandering bark, the true north of his soul's compass, lies in state and panoply and unmoving slow decay, does he take the battered little book up again.

_Shepherds of the wilderness..._

The garden where he had once thought his happiness to have begun has shown itself to be no more than illusion; shown itself to be as imaginary as those who once had power over him had believed Robert was; and love has proved itself nothing more than a reason for his heart's insurgency.

There are worse betrayers of his faith than Henry's unthinking perfidy (it seems so long ago now, and why did he care then, why was he so afraid, why did that matter when the truth is that nothing other than this void, this terrible bleak desert of heart and soul and mind and empty apartments and cold wide beds, matters very much at all?)

There is death, and himself left alive.

_These flowers, which were splendid and sprightly, waking in the dawn of the morning, in the evening will be a pitiful frivolity, sleeping in the cold night's arms..._

There is unending loneliness.

**

_One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star._

Things get better, or at least they become endurable, and that is the worst thing of all.

Richard tells himself that this is inevitable, that nothing like the pain of before could possibly last without having killed him, that nothing can sustain that kind of pain forever.

He still feels as though somehow he has become the traitor, that every time he wakes up and does not feel the vast empty ache of loss, he is become the very embodiment of _perfidious Albion_.

Every second that he spends not missing them, not longing for Anne's company, not yearning for Robert's familiar embrace, he thinks of as being somehow a sin greater than any the world might deem him to have committed.

He hides it all, as he tried to hide his love for Robbie, as he failed to hide his first raw grief. He hides it under layers of pretence, gives it all a disguise of brilliant continuance, and tries to pretend he is not guilty in his very existence and guiltier still for surviving them, surviving this; guilty for the way his body continues to function and _live_ , while they, unbreathing, all blood and thought and emotion stilled forever, rot in wooden prisons.

He hides it with endless physical activity, beneath his love of the hunt and riding, conceals his misery with excusable exhaustion.

No-one questions him. He would almost rather they did, wants somehow to push them to it, force them to say the unsayable, because he cannot. 

_Do you want to die?_

He wishes that he could still answer –

_Yes._

He wishes there was someone to whom he could be honest –

_we know, when we will, to utter true things –_

and say _Sometimes. Sometimes. But not always._

But there is no-one to whom he can entrust that final loathsome treachery of his soul.

It turns out that there is someone who already knows it.

**

York's son Edward is everything that he shouldn't be, and doesn't appear to give a damn about it. He doesn't want responsibility for anything, he doesn't particularly want to discuss government even when he is asked his opinion, he has no interest in poetry or ceremony or theory of any kind, and Richard suspects that the only reason he ever bothers with any sort of public appearance _at all_ is to stop his family nagging.

He has nothing beautiful or rare about him, nothing that would have attracted Richard before or could possibly move him now. Already thick-set and a little too heavy for fashion when Richard first meets him; and yet as blunt and kind and awkwardly capable as his physique suggests, he never seems to expect anything from Richard but an easy, undemanding quasi-friendship that is, horribly, more than either of them apparently get from anyone else.

He is the one person Richard has ever allowed anything approaching sympathy from, either for Robert or for Anne, and that both times because there was nothing in it of formality, only honest commiseration.

 _I'm sorry,_ he had said when the news came of Robert's death. He had been awkward, uneasy in his own skin – the first time Richard had ever seen him so – and patchily, unattractively flushed with his sincerity. _I liked him._

The only one who even thought of saying that – and the only one Richard would ever have believed it from (the only one he still believes it from, though Edward has never repeated it). He might not have been able to hold on to that belief, were it not for the fact that he's still not entirely sure Edward's _capable_ of lying, disadvantage though that lack indubitably is for someone from their wrecked, tangled, complex family.

In the long black days after Anne's death, Richard knows, he was there. Firmly, unobtrusively, determinedly there, not expecting or hoping to be noticed, but rather as though he had made some vow to himself –

( _but of course it wasn't to himself_. Richard thinks, knows, understands that, then and now and later, accepting that peculiar constancy for what it is. It is Edward's own strange way of upholding the vow he made when he turned eighteen, the words that Richard has learnt are so often emptily mouthed –

 _And I do faithfully promise to maintain, support, and defend, to the utmost of my power...._ )

Edward, who has no power except the virtue of being alive.

No power save fidelity, constancy, loyalty, those rare commodities. And Richard has found them, unswerving and steadfast, in the most unlikely place.

He knows it for a gift.

He wishes he could accept it with grace.

Edward is also completely appalling at casual conversation, and has the temerity, as time passes, to begin randomly and firmly announcing at odd moments a list of things Richard has to at least be _seen_ to take an interest in, which, coming from the man who's grown a full beard since he reached his majority, and who would quite happily disappear to a country estate somewhere for the rest of his life (Richard is never going to allow that, and they both know it, but he sometimes permits a wistful mention of the idea), is unbelievably aggravating – not least because Edward is, damn him, usually right.

"Why?" Richard finds himself asking on more than one occasion, coming closer than he will ever admit to whining, and one time even trying to expand on his complaint, because God damn it he does not _want_ to attend the first hunt Northumberland's whelp is responsible for, no matter how bloody superb the brat is supposed to have become at it. "Why do I have to –"

"Because you would have before," Edward says, implacable in his understanding, and Richard firmly does not find it endearing, particularly when he adds in the same calm voice, "Your Majesty."

"That," Richard says bitterly, "was in another country."

"No," Edward retorts, "it was right here."

Richard closes his eyes in not-altogether feigned pain. His closest companion these days is also, he suspects, deliberately ill-educated. It infuriates him, and he suspects it is designed to, thinks sometimes that Edward is provoking him into honest reaction – and that, he knows to his cost, he can't allow himself to ever give.

It's easier instead to give in to this new demand on his time, and not think about what he might say if he ever stopped hiding.

He commissions a gift to mark the occasion, an engraved cigarette case that will leave no-one in any doubt as to the identity of the man who gave it, ostentatious and practical at once.

"I'm sure he'll love it," Edward says, dryly bland.

"He'll be overwhelmed with gratitude at my princely largesse."

"Er," Edward says. He is trying not to laugh. "Yes. That. Obviously." His shoulder leans against Richard's as they look down at the ornately-chased silver, broad and warm and solid. He is close enough that Richard can tell that his skin smells, faintly, of sandalwood soap, and that faint traces of his cedar wardrobe cling to his jacket. He needs a better valet, and Richard thinks he should arrange for one.

He is utterly, comfortingly familiar, unchanging in a world that still, years (and months and weeks and days and hours and minutes and God, God, terrible unending seconds) after loss, turns too fast for Richard's equilibrium.

"Not everyone shares your utter lack of taste, you know," Richard feels himself obliged to point out, pushing away his need for that undemanding, comforting presence with the weapon of words he has long since learned is not in Edward's arsenal, and is startled when Edward's half-smile shuts down entirely, leaving his face a smooth blank, devoid of any emotion but vague interest.

"Yes, your Majesty. Quite," he murmurs, and excuses himself, leaving Richard to wonder what in God's name just happened, and a small part of him being horribly afraid that he _knows_.

If anyone ever finds out that he's somehow managed to make York's son love him, his life will become not only unendurable, but _impossible_. Not least because –

_just as they always do –_

they will make it a reason to send Edward away, somehow find a chink in that impermeable loyalty and make him leave...

The thought is a great deal more painful than he would ever have believed possible.

**

_He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind._

Edward of York knows that he does many things without considering what the consequences might be first. He knows it because he is repeatedly and irritatingly told so, by everyone from his father to his peers to people who have only known him for five minutes.

He wants to explain, sometimes, that it isn't so much that he hasn't considered the consequences, as that he never considers backing down from his course of action even when he realises what those consequences might be.

He supposes at times, with varying degrees of gloom depending on what the day has brought, that any one of those people anxious to tell him how thoughtless, heedless, and outright stupid he is could have told him that the inevitable conclusion to his wanting to make sure that Richard would be all right was that he would fall in love.

On the other hand, considering it's _Richard_ , and therefore firstly the King and secondly his cousin, they might not have wanted to touch the subject with a ten-foot sewer pole, and been happy to leave him unenlightened. Since he doesn't particularly care what they do now or ever contemplated doing, as long as they continue to leave him alone about it, it's not something he taxes himself with all that frequently.

Only sometimes. Only sometimes, when it becomes almost physically painful to keep up his facade of cheerful, dull steadiness, does he let himself wonder whether he would have changed his mind, not made himself such a fixture in Richard's life, not committed himself so absolutely to what he is fairly certain is a doomed enterprise.

It's not as though he even vaguely hopes that Richard might love him back one day. He just doesn't want him to give up again, doesn't want that utter blankness to return to his eyes, doesn't want to watch a living automaton ever again, or see first hand what an avatar of grief will do, each and every day, to convince the world it really exists.

He's happy to make his heart the price, if that's what it takes.

"A poor thing, but mine own," he murmurs to himself in the long corridor, moving past paintings and richness and coloured beauty that he can never hope to aspire to, and thinking wryly that Richard will probably die of shock if he ever finds out about Edward's possession of a memory that includes even that much knowledge of the written word. Even if it's wrong, which he suspects it probably is, it's still absolutely right with regard to how he feels.

He can't be Robert, cannot be rarefied and fine-made and beautiful in thought and body. He can't be Anne, with her endless, startling ability to inspire love. He can only be himself, dull and careful and kind, and hope that it keeps being that little fragmented piece of enough-for-now that Richard, for some unfathomable reason, seems to find tolerable.

He wishes, sometimes, briefly and unworthily and never fully admitted even as a thought to keep to himself, that the day will come when even that faint amount of carelessly given regard will stop being enough, and he will stop giving his all in return.

He hopes with the same fervour that that day will be his last.

Edward of York knows how to love. He does not know (and will never learn) how to relinquish that emotion.

**

The hunt, predictably, is a disaster – for everyone but a delighted, oblivious, and utterly filthy Harry Percy, who for some reason known only to him assumes that the worst assortment of people ever gathered together in one place at the same time (and Edward is including the House of Lords in this assessment) are there not because it is expected of them, or they are expecting it of themselves, but because they actually _want_ to be _riding to hounds_ in the middle of pouring rain and what Edward is fairly sure is a localised hurricane.

Henry and Richard in the same place at the same time is always painful. Henry and Richard in the middle of a hunt is quite honestly _excruciating_ , and that is before Henry's insane eldest son decides he's going to start up a one-sided rivalry with Harry for the title of better horseman.

Edward wants someone to die. He doesn't even care, particularly, if it's him. He just wants it all to _stop_ , and sudden death is the only way he can see of bringing any of it to a close.

Rivalry is utterly bloody unattractive, in any shape or form, and there are far too many layers going on of said rivalry for him to even try and keep it straight.

There's whatever has been going on for years between Richard and Henry, which seems to have spilled over into who can gain the most admiration from Henry's boy Hal, who is in turn trying to impress Richard, annoy his father, and gain all of Harry Percy's attention in the space of five minutes. Henry seems to have decided to try and strike up a friendship with the said oblivious Percy, and Richard, never one to like attention drawn away from him at the best of times, is doing his rain-drenched, sodden best to prevent that from ever happening.

And when Edward puts it like that to himself, it sounds so very, very simple.

In the middle of a rainstorm, mud, and a pack of foxhounds, it is anything but.

Edward grits his teeth, focuses on following the pack rather than letting his attention wander to whatever ghastly ploy Richard is currently using, and wishes he had even the smallest fraction of Percy's obliviousness, since he seems to have been gifted with the same outrageously foul amount of mud splatters.

And it all gets immeasurably worse when Richard hands over his gift, and Harry's thin face lights up in a smile that no-one could have suspected he was capable of producing; a look of infectious, strangely beautiful joy that Edward just _knows_ , judging by Hal's increasing glower and the overwhelming cloud of heavy disapproval emanating from Henry, Richard is responding to with more than his usual charm.

He wonders, for a brief moment, why no-one else is _ever_ willing to stop Richard from even thinking about things, and then moves forward, taking advantage of a brief moment in which Henry has managed to catch Percy's attention, to touch Richard's elbow when no-one is looking, and shake his head.

_No._

Richard's eyes go very wide, looking at Edward's hand on his arm as though it were covered in scales and slime, and then he gives a little, rueful smile, his eyelids lowering in half-amused admission of his actions. His head tilts a little, the faintest of concessions, and then the deliberate charm sparks into existence once more, this time turned on Hal.

Edward resists the almost overwhelming impulse to put his face in his hands and groan, and instead closes his eyes for a second, willing himself towards calm.

He opens them again to a look of pure fellow-feeling from Henry, before that is wiped out by his more usual frown, disapproval to the fore once more. Hal, eager to use what he perceives as a gained advantage, is close to outright flirting – with disaster, Edward thinks uncharitably, and wonders if the penalty for taking one's monarch aside and smacking him over the head would actually be death, or just imprisonment.

He doesn't even want to _think_ about the horror that awaits them in the form of dinner, but he suspects he is going to need an enormous amount of wine to get through it at all.

He turns out to be right. Fuelled by something Edward doesn't even want to consider, Richard goes to Henry that night, and while Edward doesn't want to know what happened, and doesn't want to be told, and certainly won't permit himself to feel jealous about it, the bruises he sees on Richard's body later are impossible to ignore or deny in their stark evidence.

He realises that hope is the worst supper of all, when it cannot be eaten but only looked upon.

That his familiarity with Richard is such that he is permitted to see even that much – he is permitted, even, to help him from the bath, even while he thinks, wildly _Caesar's I am,_ and wonders which one out of the three of them that should be applied to – that is something else he will not allow his mind to linger on.

That his sudden feeling of pity is, in that moment of seeing, reserved not for bruised, further-embittered Richard, not for himself, but for _Henry_ , is the worst thing of all.

 _Noli me tangere_ is always Richard's unspoken cry.

That Richard has never stopped Edward from doing the exact opposite has been the one thing he has known to be his alone. He has been allowed to offer touch, carefully judged in its moments of offering though it may be, when no-one else has been allowed to even think of it.

It is unmistakably, ineradicably, a true and constant fact no longer. He wonders what the annihilation of that fact has cost Henry.

Edward shakes, a little, under the weight of that new knowledge – and sets it aside, for some unspecified 'later'.

But the bruises haunt his dreams, mocking him with the difference between what Richard wants and what he himself offers.

And yet he cannot stop loving.

**

It shouldn't come as a surprise when Richard announces his intent to marry again, and yet, somehow, it is; and it shakes the world Edward wasn't even aware of constructing about himself to its foundations.

His response is the worst he could possibly have thought of – if he'd actually been able to think before speaking, which he can't even contemplate as a possibility.

"For God's sake, Richard, she's _Catholic_!" he blurts out, and for one terrible instant, Richard is looking at him with the kind of animosity that he sometimes imagines Henry once faced, and his entire body is chilled to the core. This isn't his friend, or his cousin, or the man he loves so very much. This is the King. This is the one man in the world Edward should not even think of questioning.

This is disaster.

"I'm sorry," he says. "Richard, I'm so damn sorry. I wasn't thinking –"

"You never bloody do," Richard says wearily, and neither of them seem able to let themselves remark on how even in the midst of proof as to who and what Richard irrefutably is, Edward has used his name, and not the title that should lie between them more now than ever before.

"I know. I know I don't, I know I'm not –"

"No, it's not that I mean – but I thought you'd be – God, I don't know, that you'd –"

"I'm happy for you. I am. I'm just – it's a hell of a thing to be doing, and I'm – I can't stop being –"

"That you'd stop worrying long enough to be happy for me –"

"—worried about you –" Edward says desperately, and reaches out, his hand impossibly square and blunt and clumsy against Richard's oddly fragile-looking wrist, and comes to a standstill, looking down at where their flesh meets.

"Christ," Richard says, sounding as helpless as Edward feels. "Edward. Listen –"

Edward shakes his head. "It's all right. It doesn't matter."

"No. It _matters_ , damn it –"

"No." Edward smiles, because he means this, he's meant it for years, and nothing's changed. "No, Richard. It doesn't."

After a long, long moment, Richard nods.

And Edward forces himself to drop his hand.

**

Richard, negotiating the quagmire that is the law of his country and the laws of who he is and the laws of Isabel's faith all combined into a thousand difficulties, tries not to think about where any of his actions are leading him.

He manages quite successfully right up until he attends the opera in Edward's company, and Wagner shatters for him any and all illusions he needed to cling to.

It is a mediocre performance of _Tannhäuser_ , the orchestra a little slow, the pacing sometimes just a little off between the singers and their reactions. 

But the baritone—the baritone singing Wolfram is sublime, and redeems it all, and Richard is lost.

"Und freundlich zeigst du den Weg aus dem Tal," he pleads, and Richard turns back to carefully shadowed Edward, as always discreetly sat at the back of the box, longing to share with someone the pleasure he finds in that voice.  But Edward's seat is empty.  His seat is empty, and the glass he was drinking from is lying flat on the thick cloth of their little table, the last sip of good champagne caught in the bowl.   His seat is empty.   Richard turns back to the stage, and a brief tremor, threatening his forced composure, runs through him as he realises why Edward has left.

"O du mein holder Abendstern..."

 _It_ matters _, damn it –_

_No, Richard. It doesn't._

Now that he has allowed himself to think of the impossible, he cannot stop. Edward's hand on his wrist, on his arm, the strong grip steadying him when he got out of the bath after that disastrous night with Henry, and oh God, Richard might not be able to feel love any more, not like that, not ever again, but he can still recognise when something is more than simple desire.

Edward, for _years_ there has been no-one he can trust or rely upon to any real degree but Edward, his body, like his affections, always warm and strong and steady – though Richard has pretended to himself for all those years that he has never leant upon that strength, has tried until tonight to pretend that he does not still lean now.

But the music has torn away all veils of self-deception.

The faint, strangely and dearly familiar smell of sandalwood soap at Northumberland's shooting lodge, Edward warning him off with no more than a touch and a look of wry negation.

Edward at Anne's funeral, preventing him from further disaster, and the same hands on his arms, holding him back as he moved forward again to deliver another blow to Fitzalan's simpering, ingratiating, _late_ visage. That same ingrained knowledge of a presence that meant safety, the hint of cedar from the outdated wardrobe, sandalwood from soap. Always the same.

The rough feel of Edward's beard on the top of his head one night, as he wept in drunken, maudlin grief – for Anne, and for Robbie, and for the times he would never have with them again. For the fact that memory had stopped being enough.

Edward, unchanging and unfaltering – until this.

_I am breaking his heart._

"Vom Herzen, das sie nie verriet..." prays oblivious Wolfram, and Richard, visible to all, cannot even let a flicker of this new and terrible understanding cross his face.   _From a heart that never betrayed its faith..._

_Fidelity, loyalty, love, and I –_

He tries not to flinch away from this new knowledge.   _Christ. Oh Christ. Edward._

Richard breathes slowly and carefully, trying not to betray his own pain, hoping to God that anyone observing him will put any emotion down to the terrible, beautiful voice.

"Wenn sie entschwebt dem Tal der Erden..."

He thinks of his own evening star, dead and to be prayed to as sincerely.

 _Anne,_ he thinks. _Anne, this is the one thing you would never forgive me. To hurt someone, and keep hurting them because I can't let them go. To hurt them because I can't bear to give anything that's mine away. You'd never forgive me that._

Anne had liked Edward. She would never have countenanced what has begun to amount to cruelty.

Richard knows that this, here, is the difference he can make, where he finally accepts that it is one thing to wait for his death – patiently, impatiently, with longing or with dull defeat, it isn't important, but what _is_ important, what has to, _must_ matter, is that it is another thing entirely to make someone else long for their own end.

"No more," he whispers, unable to stop the words. His hand comes up to cover his mouth, concealing his lips' movement. "No more."

_A heart that never betrayed its faith..._

And he is no more a traitor to memory than Edward will ever be to him.

Richard, caught in music and longing and unavoidable truth, makes his decision.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with the demands of the Catholic Church, or his own. It has nothing to do with Isabel, nor the House of Lords, nor anything that he has believed himself to be struggling with for the last endless months. It is a decision and recognition at once, and made the easier because it is both.

"Die nächt'ge Dämm rung teilt dein lieber Strahl,  
und freundlich zeigst du den Weg aus dem Tal."

He can trust in that much. He can trust in Edward's unswerving friendship.

He can trust Edward.

He thinks he might just be able to live with that.

**

To get back to the palace and be informed that Edward was retired for the evening, not being something that had factored in Richard's attack of opera-inspired decisiveness, is a decidedly unwelcome addition to his plans. He realises that he has been entertaining romantic scenarios that are entirely at odds with either what he knows of Edward's nature, or his own behaviour to date, and feels an abrupt kind of shame that startles him somewhat – though not enough to prevent him from very nicely and politely conveying that he wants to see the Lord Edward _yes, tonight, as soon as possible, thank you,_ in his apartments.

He restrains himself from adding _now_ , though considering the demands he has always made on Edward's time and attendance, he suspects no-one would be surprised.

Unbelievably, when Edward arrives, he seems to have been quite sincere in his announcement of retirement for the night. He looks utterly ludicrous with his winged collar half unstudded, no waistcoat or tie, and a horrendous sack jacket thrown over the whole appalling remnants of his evening dress.

"It wasn't _that_ urgent," Richard can't stop himself saying, cresting the wave of the absurd, and Edward gives him a look of pure incomprehension, before Richard raises his hand to his own, still-neat collar.

"Ah." Edward doesn't even look faintly embarrassed by Richard's observation, simply removes the last stud from the back of his shirt with a slight look of perplexity, and takes off the collar, putting both into his jacket pocket with a shrug. Not for the first time, Richard wonders how any of his garments survive more than a single wearing. "My apologies. They did say 'immediately'."

Richard would make a joke about Edward's always being that obedient to his whims, but now it seems a little too close to the truth, and he knows it would be a long way from humour even to mention it.

"What would you have done if it was three in the morning?" he asks instead, and Edward's vaguely bewildered look turns into equally mild irritation.

"Put on a dressing gown, I hope," he says a little dryly, and Richard grins despite himself.

"Right. I remember..."

He thinks he remembers. There was a time when hours of day and night had stopped mattering.

Edward puts his thumb and middle finger over his eyes, and presses them inwards, rubbing over his eyelids with a faint grimace. 

"I'm missing what was immediate about this...."

"You left the opera."

"Yes," Edward agrees wearily, lowering his hand. His eyes are faintly reddened from his fingers' pressure. He waits for Richard to expand, looking tired and worn-out and as though he is dreading whatever is coming next.

"You were right," Richard says abruptly.

"To leave the opera?" There's nothing false about Edward's utter confusion.

"No." Richard shakes his head, and swallows, wishing that Edward was better with words, or that he could be granted a little more grace with them at this instant. Anything, rather than this. "No, when you said it doesn't matter. You were right."

"That's...no, I have no idea what – _what_?"

Richard crosses the room, over the carpet from which his and Henry's blood has been so long-ago and carefully removed, and closes the impossible gap between desire and possession.

"It doesn't matter," he repeats, and raises his hand to lie against the bearded side of Edward's face. Infinitely familiar, and utterly dear to him, and why he had ever thought that this was a _decision_ is currently beyond him.

"It doesn't _matter_."

He kisses Edward with all the sweetness of inevitability.

It never occurs to him that from the other side, it might be as bitter as gall.

**

The arrangements for his marriage to Isabel are finalised.

Edward says nothing, but his eyes are shadowed, the worry never seems to fade from him now, and Richard knows, the night before his wedding, that this is another time of being true that has come to an end.

Fidelity is a two-edged sword.

"You should marry," he tries, that last night. 

"Richard, this may come as a blinding surprise to you, but I really don't want to either marry or discuss it."

"No, it – you should."

"I'm not really in the mood," Edward says, with a trace of exasperation. "And I can't see that changing."

"But if it does." Richard persists, because he knows this has to be said, that it is as close to admitting love as he will ever be allowed, now that everything is signed and all that is left to him is to say the words. "If it does, if you want to – promise you'll tell me. I couldn't bear it, if you felt you couldn't tell me..."

"I'll always tell you." Edward smiles, heartbreaking in his honesty. "How couldn't I? I love you."

It feels less like an affirmation than a death-knell.

"Don't give up on me," Richard whispers, and presses his forehead hard into Edward's shoulder. "Promise me. Promise you won't give up, even when you get tired of all this –"

There is a long silence, and then Edward lifts his hand to rest on the back of Richard's head.

"Yes," he says at last. "I promise."

**

_The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star._

It is as though Richard's marriage has unleashed in him an endless capacity for error, all of it too-easily played on by the constitutional, inherent distaste the country has for any suspicion of Catholicism arriving amongst them to taint their monarchy. Henry, even while he reaps the benefits of the shifting, suspicious allegiances of Parliament and the House of Lords, nonetheless reels under the mounting disasters until his ambition asserts itself, and he moves quickly to secure an inheritance he knows should never be his.

The outcome is victory, and utterly hollow with it.

Abdication for Richard, exile for Isabel while her world is set into an order she wants none of, and the knowledge for Henry that he has broken his oath finally and completely.

The shattered might-have-been of years past is still lying there between them, too sharply cutting a wasteland for either of them to dare step into, even for their souls' sake.

Richard kneels to Henry in the bitterest mockery of a vow he has ever witnessed, and the touch of his lips on Henry's hand burns like the mark of Cain.

Richard cannot stay in England, not even in the seclusion he has chosen for himself. Henry knows this.

But he is damned if he knows a way of making Richard leave.

And the alternative is – unthinkable.

**

Edward endures, because he knows no other way of behaving. He is sickened by guilt, horrified by his own acceptance of Henry, and helpless before the unstoppable unfolding of events.

He endures Henry's mistrust and the mockery of his peers. He tells himself that he is holding to his promise, that in enduring, he is keeping his word, and not giving up.

He tells himself that for months, keeps telling himself that there is no other way – until he sees in Henry's eyes the growing desire to finally drive away all question of his innate right to be King. 

He thinks of Richard's plea, the night before his marriage to Isabel.

_Don't give up on me._

He promised. He meant it. He still means it.

It is a promise that means more than any new oath to the Crown that he is beginning to despise.

And for the first time in his life, he lies about his intentions and his future whereabouts; lies so successfully that he is astonished at its ease.

He goes to see Richard.

**

"Are you _insane_?" is the first thing Richard says when he arrives, not even letting him get past the hallway of the house before he initiates a confrontation, and Edward, fresh from months of political hell, doesn't even flinch.

"Quite possibly, yes, and your excuse would be?"

"My _excuse_? I'm not the one who –"

"Your excuse," Edward says, slowly and deliberately, "for not trying to get away before something truly unfortunate _does_ happen to you."

"What exactly would you call this?" Richard demands. "A happy, fortunate state of being?"

"Stupid," Edward says bluntly. "Very, very stupid."

"And you came here to tell me that you told me so?" Richard sounds hurt, now, rather than demanding or angry. It is almost a relief.

"No. If I'd wanted to say that I'd have told you before." Edward summons up his last reserves of patience. "I came to tell you that I can get you to France. To Isabel, if you want. As a first port of call somewhere else if you –"

"Orders from Henry?" Richard asks, nastily, and Edward's rare temper flares.

"No, you stupid bastard, the exact opposite! I'm here for _you_ , or did you think I'd forget what I –"

He is seconds away from taking Richard by his lapels and shaking him, because of all the people to accuse of that, of all the damn things to _say_ –

"You can give up on yourself if you want," he says. The words come out strangled-sounding, constricted by the anger that clogs his throat. "But don't ask me to. Don't ever bloody ask me to. And don't you dare assume – don't you _dare_ –"

"Why shouldn't I?" Richard asks coldly. "You've given your oath to Henry now, or are you going to turn traitor twice over?"

" _Jesus_ ," Edward whispers, stunned and sick as his anger leaves him. "That's what you – that's how you see – oh God, this really was pointless. And I thought I –"

He closes his eyes. 

_All for nothing. All for nothing, because he'll never forgive me. It's all been for nothing._

All the arrangements, all the deceit.

Worthless.

"Richard, I love you." It's the only thing that's still true in his terrible new world. "I can't change what's happened. I can't put things right. I can't – I can't do anything except get you away from here, and if what I've got left to offer is worth anything at all to you, then _please_ –" He stops, feeling the utter futility of his scramble after words sharp as broken glass on his tongue. "You deserve a chance at life," he says painfully, scraping the trite little sentiment past his teeth, because he has to say it, even if this is and always was doomed as an attempt, he has to say it. "It should be a better one than this. I know that. But it's all I've got to try and give you. A chance. I know it's not enough, I know –"

He runs out of words that might even begin to persuade, runs out like a well gone dry, and, silenced by his own inadequacy, stands in the narrow hallway, his hands held out in front of him like a supplicant, and waits for the words of rejection he knows are coming.

"Edward – if you do this, you can't go back." It isn't anything like what he was expecting, but he supposes the rest will come in a moment, and lifts his chin, waiting to hear it.

"I know."

"You'll – what, come with me?"

"Until you don't want me," Edward agrees, and doesn't flinch.

"Until I don't –" Richard, unbelievably, laughs. "Have I ever told you that you hold yourself too bloody cheap?" he asks.

"I think I'd remember that one," Edward says, "so no. In fact." He holds himself very still, not daring to hope, not daring to wait for anything but the final dismissal that neither of them will be able to go back from.

"And if I asked you to stay?" Richard asks, and Edward steels himself, takes a shuddering breath, and gives Richard his last scraps of honesty.

"Only if you leave," he says. "I won't stay and wait for –"

"No. If I came with you. Now. Right now. If I came with you. _Would you stay with me_?"

Edward closes his eyes, and gives himself over to fate and Richard and whatever twisted idea of justice-in-this-world has taken them all over.

"Yes," he says, and startles at the feel of Richard's cold, long fingers around his wrists, pressing in with a grip that is as shaking and terrified as Edward feels. He opens his eyes.

"Promise not to leave me again," Richard says, intent and white-faced. "Don't. Don't leave me again."

"I never left in the first place," Edward says, and it might not be the answer he should have given, but it seems to be enough, because Richard gives an odd little gasp that could be relief or pain, and his hands tighten on Edward's wrists for an impossibly painful moment.

He doesn't step away.

"All right," he says at last. "How do we do this?"

**

Edward gets them to the yacht. He can't believe that no-one is waiting, that no-one knows, that no-one has seen through his flimsy lies and is ready to expose his lunatic scheme for the cracked little thing that he knows it is; but no-one steps from the shadows or tries to stop them at any point.

 _Perhaps,_ he thinks, _they know and they don't care._

It is not a very comforting idea.

"You must have paid people well," Richard says neutrally. It is the first time he has spoken since they left the house.

"Enough for temporary loyalty," Edward agrees. He feels drained, as though he has undergone some great physical exertion. "The crew –"

"Are French." Richard grins. "Isabel?"

"Partly." Edward doesn't feel like talking about the other part. They go into the cabin.

The rain beats down outside.

"A fair sea and a following wind," Richard murmurs, and Edward half-laughs.

"We can but hope."

"Edward, what I said, back at the house – you don't have to. You don't have to leave England. You could stay –"

"No."

"I feel –" Richard runs his hand over his face. He looks even more tired than Edward feels. "I'm taking you away from everything you love, you're going to lose everything, and it'll be my fault –"

"No."

"If it weren't for me –"

Edward tries again, a demanding, desperate edge creeping into his voice, hard as he tries to bury it. " _No._ It isn't your fault. None of this is your fault. But if you let it ruin your life now, let it ruin what we have now and what we could have for ourselves, for _us_ , in any possible time that's to come – then yes. Yes, that is your fault. It will be your fault. And you won't have to worry about forgiving yourself." He leans into Richard and stares into his eyes. "Because _I_ won't forgive you. Understand that, Richard. If you make me walk away from what has always been the only good thing in my life, I will _never_ forgive you."  Richard stares back at him with utter stillness, utter quiet, and all Edward can think is – 

_He asked me to stay. Not to leave him. He asked me to stay and here he is leaving me._

He can feel his stomach turning into a hard, sickening ball of something horrendously like ice as he tries, and tries hard, not to fall back into old expectations and ancient memories that should no longer matter; tries not to relinquish himself to the belief he has always tried so hard to shake from his heart – that in Richard's attempts at love lie the seeds of abandonment. 

_Not this time. It can't happen this time._   Then Richard raises their joined hands to his mouth and kisses Edward's fingers, lowering his head to rest his cheek on their linked hands. In the endless moments of silence that follow, Edward feels Richard's breath on the back of his hand, ragged and uneven, and is able, somehow, to finally accept that Richard is there, that he had been wrong in his assumptions, that they have, in these few moments, risked – and from that moment will come one day to risk again – the pain of losing. He accepts for the first time that Richard has survived that risk, and that fear of loss, and the reality that is inevitable and that one day _will_ be loss, just as Edward has, and does. 

They are not so different, after all.  Finally, Richard says, not looking at anything in particular, but his voice quietly determined nonetheless –   "I won't walk away, Edward, and I won't ruin it. Not this time. Not ever again."

It's more than enough.

**

The wind is a great deal more than fair. It's not quite a storm, but it's bidding to become one, and Richard cannot bear the cabin's confinement for a second more. Edward is asleep, a washed-out chiaroscuro painting of dark hair and beard and ashy, exhausted skin under the dim light. It would take more cruelty than Richard possesses even at his worst to wake him.

The wind and rain are cold, biting through to his skin, less refreshing than they are a sudden paralysing shock to all his surface nerves, so that he can feel his ribs contract and his breath leave him for a second – and then it exhilarates instead, the adrenalin borne of surprise washing through him and giving him back air, so that he draws in icy needles towards the back of his throat, gulps them in with as much pleasure as though the hard water were being given to him in a chilled glass.

The wood is slippery beneath his feet.

Richard makes his way to the side, holds on to a rope, and leans out over endless green-black, looking up to see no stars or moon, but only the faintest light of moving grey against more depth of dark. Clouds and waves and the swell of it all under and over him, the world moving as it must while he goes towards –

What? Safe haven?

_Exile._

A promise.

_I won't ruin it._

France. Isabel, perhaps. Edward, for certain.

The rain drives down around him.

Richard tilts his head back, and longs for the stars.

_O du mein holder Abendstern...._

He closes his eyes, and meets the same inky black, no memory-light remaining imprinted on his vision. He might be blind.

The yacht's movement is strange under his feet, a pull and tug of determination that makes him realise why ships have souls.

He opens his eyes again, and looks down to the endless swelling depths that he can only feel exist, can no longer see.

_I won't ruin this._

"I won't," he whispers, and smiles, an odd serenity filling him. "I won't, because I'm not the one choosing."

He lets the rope slide free of his fingers, and lets his arms drop to his sides.

It is only seconds before the water takes him from his balance, sliding his equilibrium quickly and gently away from under his feet and immersing him in a depth that feels warmer than the rain; the rising swell carrying him for an instant, and then letting him go.

He only falls when the wave releases him.

It is nothing like he has ever imagined drowning would be. It is like relief, like the long slow fall from the height of pleasure, into welcoming arms.

He wonders, as the water fills his lungs, what he has ever been afraid of.

**

Anger, Henry finds, is the most unsustaining of emotions. It takes him just as far as retrieving a yacht from the Channel and a half-drowned, battered Edward from the yacht, and leaves him utterly shattered, no resources left with which to view the body which someone else

(thank God)

has brought from the far side of the Isle of Wight.

He is bereft of words, even to accuse or threaten or command, and besides, what can he say, even if he finds thoughts to utter? What penalty can he possibly find impose on Edward that the sea and grief has not already done for him?

(what penalty can he impose on himself, that knowledge has not brought him?)

He behaves with compassion. He orders the best of medical care, not imprisonment, for Edward.

He tries not to remember.

_I don't want it to be different._

_Then it won't be._

He orders the funeral.

_God save the King._

He closes his heart.

**

Edward surfaces through a haze of muffled, deadened emotion and numbed pain into awareness, and knows that both are waiting for his drugged stupor to recede with an equally sharp agony.

He is half-expecting to be greeted by Henry once again, demanding answers he cannot give. Instead, it is Harry Percy's broken-nosed face that looks down at him, drawn with concern.

"The hell're you doing here?" he mutters.

Percy's face flinches, as though his slurred words had been a whip, lashing across it.

"I – not sure. I just – I had to come. Had to say –"

_I'm sorry. I liked him._

Edward is laughing before Percy can even finish his sentence. "God," he gasps. "God, it never ends..."

The laughter sets off more pain than he had even thought was there, a series of splintering torn movements in his ribs that is very, very wrong.

"Christ. Sorry. I'll get –"

There is a great deal of clattering, and the sting of a needle in his arm that he knows means the deadening will soon return.

He breathes.

"Should I go?"

"No." Edward grits out. He fumbles out a hand, and grips on to Percy's calloused fingers, hard. "Just –"

The fingers turn in his, and hold back.

"I can do that," Percy says quietly. There is the scrape of a chair on the floor.

Edward holds on, and sleeps. He has no desire to wake.

But he does, and he is alone, and this time the grief is waiting, grips him and consumes him and tears him to bleeding shreds that he wishes could be real.

It is only when its claws release him for a brief moment of unwanted exhaustion that he realises he is still holding on, his fingers cramped, to something.

He raises his arm to eye level, and slowly uncurls his aching hand.

In it is the cigarette case that Richard gave Harry on the day of that long ago hunt.

Richard's emblem, stamped for all to see in decorated glory, and the curling insignia and initials.

He remembers the words he heard on the cusp of the welcome dark. Harry Percy's voice, young and grim and so very determined and everything he used to think he could be – 

"I won't forget."

Edward lets his hand fall back to lie on the counterpane.

"And I can't," he whispers to the silent room. "I never will."

_I promise._

"Don't give up on me," whispers the voice of a dead king and a lost lover, and Edward remembers the touch of Richard's fair hair beneath his hand, remembers what it feels like to swear something in all sincerity, remembers what it feels like to hope.

Remembers love.

"I promise."

 

FIN

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in 2010, and set in an AU which started out just before WWI, and continued. It was actually part of a back-story for Hotspur/Kate (the second half of which has yet to be written) and imagines the whole scenario in a world about to fall apart.


End file.
